Drug Lords (2018) s01e02 Episode Script
The Cali Cartel
Miguel calls me and said, "Prepare everything to go to the desert.
" When I get there, the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, they were there, and their bodyguards.
There was a guy, and he had visible signs of being hurt.
Gilberto, very softly he said, "You know you're in trouble.
" And this guy, he said, "I admit I made a big mistake.
" At that point there was silence.
He knew what was gonna happen.
They tied him with chains to two cars and, slowly, they pulled him apart in opposite directions.
They were called the Gentlemen of Cali.
But I had never seen any organization so cruel, so bloody.
So bad.
December 1993, Cali.
Home to the new kings of coke.
Gilberto and Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela.
They've just become the most powerful cartel in Colombia.
Supplying 90% of the country's biggest export, cocaine.
Their tentacles reached out through all continents.
The Rodríguez brothers were essentially defined as the biggest criminals in the world.
The largest cartel of all time.
The brothers are pulling in an estimated seven billion dollars a year.
The country was not in the hands of the people, it was in the hands of the mob.
The Rodríguez brothers owned Colombia.
But the Colombian police and the American DEA are joined in a bitter campaign to bring them down.
You knew about the power, the influence and the money that they had, so you'd sit back and think, "How are you gonna catch these guys?" Rural southern Colombia, the 1940s.
Gilberto and younger brother Miguel grow up in small-town poverty.
As teenagers, they make a name for themselves as hustlers with their creative money-making schemes.
Gilberto worked in a drugstore located just in front of one of the main churches in Cali.
All year, they collected small bottles.
And during the Holy Week, they filled them with water and sold them by saying it was holy water.
It's not long before the pair graduate from petty crime to the hard-core robbing trucks, racketeering, even kidnapping.
When they buy a legitimate pharmacy, it mysteriously burns down.
It was my uncle and my dad.
They took out the most expensive products.
The drugstore burnt down completely.
They did a good job.
They claimed insurance.
They collected the insurance and opened another drugstore a much larger drugstore.
In the mid-'70s, Gilberto and his brother discover another Colombian pharmaceutical that offers even larger profits.
There's a booming market for cocaine in the US.
If they can get it there.
Ever inventive, the pair buy a company exporting concrete fence posts into Miami.
Each of them filled with some hidden cargo.
My father's chauffeur asked me to go to the hangar with him because he had some work to do.
When we went down to the hangar, he used a pneumatic hammer to break the posts and get the cocaine out.
That's how I discovered that my father was a drug trafficker.
By now, the brothers are moving millions of dollars of coke.
Eager to expand, they team up with two other ambitious traffickers to build their distribution in America.
Chepe Santacruz and Pacho Herrera.
The Cali cartel is here.
Chepe used to send 20 kilograms in suitcases carried by passengers.
My father said, "No.
" He believed 20 kilograms was too little.
He suggested they started sending in 100 or 200 kilograms.
By the mid-1980s, the Rodríguez brothers are shipping industrial quantities of coke to the US.
They could get a 727 for a million dollars on the used airplane market, fill it full of tons and tons of cocaine, fly it over the border and land it in some place in New Mexico and unload it and abandon the plane.
Just leave it there.
The million dollars that it cost to bring the plane in was nothing compared to the hundreds of millions they were making on shipments like that.
But the new source of drugs has started to appear on the feds' radar.
We knew about the Cali cartel because we had major loads when I was in Miami.
And anytime you had ton loads seized in Miami, you know it had the markings of the Cali cartel.
We always heard about the Cali cartel, we'd heard about the Rodríguez brothers, but it's kinda like the bogeyman when you were a kid.
You always knew that they were there in the closet, but you couldn't see 'em or know where they were.
But you knew they were always around.
Ever secretive, the brothers build a screen of legitimate companies to hide their thriving narcotics empire.
To the outside world they're just big businessmen.
They owned a bank.
They owned the best soccer team.
They owned, at that time, 250 drugstores.
We estimate that every day they could invest $25 million in all their businesses.
I saw rooms stuffed full of money.
At home, our safe was full of dollars.
They didn't know what to do with the money; it was too much.
They bought works by Picasso, Grau, Botero.
The feds try tracking the cartel's operations, but they can't follow the trail of corrupt money back to the brothers.
Gilberto was something of a genius.
He was called the Chess Player 'cause he's always looking ahead, looking how things would work together.
In reality, he was a great strategist and a great corrupter.
Whereas Miguel Rodríguez was a strong man, determined and ill-tempered.
And that match was the perfect combination.
Cocaine is their business, but power is their drug.
Now, at the top of their game, these are the Gentlemen of Cali, with friends in high places.
They liked mixing in the circles of power and corrupt those within.
They particularly liked mixing with politicians, senators, representatives, mayors.
And that was the focus of the Rodríguez corruption.
As demand increases, millions of dollars of Colombian coke is flooding into the US every week.
But it's another cartel that's monopolizing the DEA's efforts.
Run by the Rodríguez brothers' biggest rival.
A drug lord with a taste for publicity and a very public bloodlust.
Pablo Escobar.
Now a narco state, Colombia is divided between these two immensely powerful drug cartels.
Escobar's Medellín cartel in the north and the Cali cartel in the south.
The cartels controlled, you know, everything from the police, the military, through the politicians.
For years, the cartels walk a very delicate line, respecting each other's turf.
At the beginning, they were all close friends and each had their own patch.
They had a rule New York belonged to the Cali cartel.
Los Angeles belonged to the Medellín cartel.
Miami and Houston were shared cities where both could enter.
And this was always respected.
Each has their own distinct way of running their business.
Violence is Escobar's.
Pablo was basically a narco terrorist.
He killed people, he intimidated people and he threatened people.
It was a very tense time in Colombia.
In fact, the apartment I ended up living in took some of the shock waves from one of the bombs he exploded in Bogotá.
Pablo was disrupting everything in the country, and he was enemy number one.
The Cali cartel has a subtler way of exerting its power.
Gilberto said, "Look, we think differently.
Pablo thinks that by planting bombs, threatening, kidnapping He will gain power, but that is not our way.
" Their MO was to bribe people, to discredit people, to get them on board.
So they did everything in a much lower profile.
They knew if they went around killing police officers, setting bombs in streets, that's bad for business.
With the spotlight on Escobar, the brothers expand their business under the DEA's radar.
But then, a shock wave hits Colombia.
Under the threat of extradition, Pablo Escobar declares war on the entire Colombian state.
And, his old friends, the Cali cartel.
The first thing Pablo did, in a raid, was burn down 18 or 20 of their drugstores in Medellín.
Four or five shopkeepers died.
It's all-out war between the cartels.
Then, Escobar makes it very personal.
They had a phone conversation with Pablo Escobar in which he told them, "If you are not with me you're against me I'll show them that I can have you killed in five minutes.
" A bomb was planted in Jardín City to try to kill my uncle.
And they tried to kidnap me when I was at university.
The Rodríguez family is under siege.
One time, my father showed us a video tape he had received in an envelope.
He sat all his children and nephews down and made us watch it.
He had filmed us and narrated everything with his own voice.
He said, "Look, that's your oldest son, his name is Fernando.
He drives a red Mazda L, with plate so and so.
He has four escorts and two motorbikes.
Look, this is your other son.
" When I saw that video, I shuddered.
I went cold because he had us fully identified.
I had thought we were invisible.
When the threats against our family started and they said our children had to leave the country that was the worst moment of our lives.
The saddest, the most horrible.
Gilberto and Miguel are furious.
No more the Gentlemen of Cali, it's time to fight back.
First, they must find someone with the right kind of connections.
They turn to the son of a Colombian general who's provided mercenaries for the Colombian army in the past.
His name, Jorge Salcedo.
Cali cartel needed people of the ability and the strength to cope with Pablo Escobar.
'Cause they were merciless people capable of doing the most horrible, unimaginable things.
To his surprise, the Rodríguez brothers put Salcedo in charge of a handpicked squad.
I was never asked, "Will you do it?" It was a situation where I had no way out.
But my thought is, "Once this thing is over, I will just leave.
That's my mission, period.
" February 1989.
Salcedo flies in his band of hardened soldiers from special forces all over the world.
The maverick mercenaries film every step of their secret mission.
It's very much like the movies, like The Dirty Dozen, there were 12 in this team.
There was one specialized in explosives, there was a medic, there was another guy in intelligence.
I knew they were not nuns, but you cannot confront nuns with Pablo Escobar.
Their leader, David Tomkins, is a soldier of fortune, a veteran of the battlefields of Angola.
The target was to eliminate, neutralize kill, assassinate Pablo Escobar.
Tomkins meets the cartel and names his price for Escobar's head.
And kind of ceremoniously, he said, "This will be costing you one million dollars.
" Instantly, Gilberto said, "Twice that amount, three times, that's not a problem if you are capable of giving us back the family life that we used to have.
" They named their secret mission to assassinate their arch enemy "Operation Phoenix.
" First step, they find a training base in the jungle.
Then the brothers equip them with an arsenal of weapons.
No expense spared.
We had M16s, AR-15s, Zulu grenades, hand grenades, machine pistols, the whole nine yards.
It was like a toy shop.
Next, they must decide where to carry out the hit on Escobar.
Unfortunately, he was a very elusive target.
The government were after him, the Cali cartel were after him, so he had lots of enemies.
So we decided, "Right, we'll train specifically for Hacienda Nápoles.
" Escobar's heavily defended 7,000 acre ranch is the last place he will expect an attack.
And the mercenaries have a plan.
Historically, whilst the police had been there before, they had never been attacked, so we figured that we had a tactical advantage by approaching as police and military.
I'm about to change the color of this United States of America chopper.
And we're gonna respray it a nice Colombian police green.
But once the soldiers land, they know Escobar's bodyguards won't go down without a fight.
So we had a dress rehearsal, rehearsed the battle without an enemy.
While we were training, the Cali cartel were attempting to locate Escobar.
So we waited and we waited and we waited.
Three months after they land in Colombia, the brothers' web of informers locates Pablo Escobar.
Eventually, we got a call, "He's there, sitting round the swimming pool at a meeting.
" It's very unlikely that we're gonna have a better opportunity than now.
We got the signal, "Go.
" And we flew to Hacienda Nápoles.
The hired guns set off, while the Rodríguez brothers monitor the mission from Cali.
They were just listening like people will listen to a radio at a soccer game.
And constantly "Where are you? Where are you? How's it going?" "Yeah, we're approaching the location.
" The Cali cartel has been waiting years for this moment.
With Pablo Escobar dead, they will finally be the dominant drug lords of Colombia.
After about two hours, we hit very bad weather.
The helicopters didn't like it, 'cause they were very heavily loaded with ammunition and explosives and we were trying to get over a mountain range.
Our pilot thought he could get through this gap in the mountains.
We hit a bunch of cloud.
The pilot said, "I'm diving into it.
" And that was the last thing I heard from him.
The mercenaries' helicopter crashes into the side of a mountain, killing the Colombian pilot and badly injuring some of the team.
It was terrible.
It was absolutely atrocious.
Operation Phoenix, Gilberto and Miguel's elaborate plot to kill Escobar fails.
The blow is devastating.
But refusing to admit defeat, the cartel comes up with a new plan of action.
Joining forces with an unlikely ally which wants Escobar dead as much as they do.
The Colombian state.
The Rodríguezes were funneling all the funds and information and materials to be helpful in intelligence.
The Cali cartel I mean, their intelligence network was incredible.
It's been compared to the KGB during the Cold War.
The brothers even managed to tap Escobar's own phone lines.
Gilberto's partner, Aura, is one of the few trusted to hear the highly sensitive recordings.
When I found something important, I recorded the relevant bits to another tape.
And those compilation tapes with anything interesting were sent to Miguel.
He then sent them to the state intelligence agencies.
Letting them know about possible attacks.
From their network of informants, the brothers' intel reaches the Search Bloc, Colombia's special ops unit dedicated to tracking down Escobar.
On December 2nd, 1993, the hunters close in on their prey shooting Escobar dead in a hail of gunfire on a Medellín rooftop.
The Rodríguez brothers have helped eliminate Colombia's most brazen enemy, and their most ferocious rival.
Gilberto was totally euphoric.
He couldn't believe they had succeeded.
He cried, saying, "I saved my children's lives.
" The whole town was in carnival, sponsored by them.
There was an open bar for everybody who wanted to celebrate.
Gilberto and Miguel now believe they're invulnerable.
And Salcedo's job is done.
Or so he thinks.
Naively, I thought, "The Rodríguezes will let me go.
" So I'm thinking that this is my time to say goodbye.
But Miguel immediately answers, "No, no, no.
No, Jorge, you've gotta stay here.
We still have some things to do.
" I thought to myself, "Oh, my god.
This is not real.
" Instead of standing him down, Miguel promotes Salcedo to head of his personal security team.
It's a decision that will come back to haunt the brothers.
With the collapse of Escobar's empire, the Cali cartel is triumphant.
It now controls 90% of Colombia's cocaine traffic, worth billions and billions of dollars.
In the mid-'90s, the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers were essentially defined as the biggest criminals in the world.
And control of Colombia itself is now in the brothers' hands.
It's their drug money which flows through the country's veins.
They paid a wage to everyone in Cali.
They had the government, they had the mayor, ministers, they had congressmen, people in the president's house, army forces, the police forces.
For many years the corrupting power of money kept them safe.
My father, Gilberto, and my uncle Miguel always believed that money could buy anyone.
But just when the brothers think they finally have everything under control, they find themselves on the wrong side of the law again.
The day that Pablo Escobar died, the director of the DEA in Colombia says, "And when are we going to capture the Rodríguez Orejuelas?" They were the only game in town.
Pablo was done, Medellín cartel was done.
Everybody knew the next logical move for all of the US government and the Colombian resources was to target the Cali cartel.
Special agents Chris Feistl and David Mitchell are sent to Cali on a secret mission.
Bring down the brothers.
But not everyone is willing to play ball.
There were other people, too, that thought, "Hey, we kind of owe them a debt because they helped the Colombian government go after Pablo and Medellín cartel.
" So there was a slight reluctance to target them.
So the feds play their trump card.
The United States provides huge amounts of financial support and aid.
You want this aid and you want our military help, you need to crack down on the drug trafficking.
Feistl and Mitchell team up with DEA Agent Jerry Salameh, but they soon realize that the brothers still control the streets.
Anything that happened in Cali, they would know about it.
They spread money around to so many different people, they were able to really know what was going on at any given time.
And we were staying at the police base where the Search Bloc was located.
We were extremely low profile.
Anything we had to do outside of the base, we'd do at night.
We, through a source, received some cassette tapes of us speaking on the phone, the hard line phones in that base.
You know, back to Bogotáor whoever we were talking to, the source brought us tapes.
And said, "They got your phones.
They got your phones that you're using.
" So you really didn't know who you can trust and who you couldn't.
We knew the police in Cali were infiltrated by the cartel.
We sacked around 10,000 police officers.
That really hurt.
But it had to be done.
It's time for the authorities to go on the offensive.
After years living in high society, Gilberto and Miguel are forced into hiding.
Colombian forces raid one safe house after another.
All fitted with secret compartments, or caletas.
But the brothers are always one step ahead of the law.
So, for example, if we had good information that Miguel may have been at a location and we get there and it's empty is there a possibility that that raid got compromised? If so, who had access to that information? So it was kind of play as you go, figure it out on the fly.
Like all gangsters, the brothers fear one thing above all others.
Betrayal.
And they make the brutal consequences of it known to everyone around them.
Including Salcedo.
One night, Miguel tells Salcedo to meet him at a villa on the edge of Cali.
I can hear shouting, screaming I couldn't understand what was happening.
There's no Miguel, just henchmen and a group of Panamanians who they suspect of informing.
In one of the rooms there was a violent fight.
Three or four guys trying to take hold of one Panamanian guy.
And I remember there was a guy with a big knife.
Then I got an idea what's going on.
They're killing people now.
Not even the women are spared.
Her feet were extending like a ballet dancer.
She had been suffocated.
One of the guys was saying, "Hey, you better move out of there, because she's gonna urinate.
" How did he know? He's experienced.
They were masters in the killing.
They were using the knives to open their stomachs to make sure that when thrown in the river the bodies would not surface.
Awful.
Awful.
Salcedo soon realizes Miguel wants him to witness a massacre.
There was no reason for me to be there.
That was something that had been carefully planned.
They needed me somehow to get dirty with what they're doing.
Now I am in the fraternity of the killing.
The brothers have shown their true face.
The only way out of the cartel is death.
But what Miguel and Gilberto don't know is how near the edge they are.
The DEA are closing in.
We had a tremendous surveillance operation mounted in that area.
We had, you know, men, women, DEA, police.
The behavior of one man in particular draws their attention.
They suspect he's Gilberto's assistant.
Every day, he would travel where we suspected Gilberto was hiding.
Probably four to five miles to get from one house to the other.
He was very hard to follow.
He would walk, he would take buses, he would take cabs.
Changing clothes.
He would dip into a building and then slip back out of it.
Gilberto thinks he's safe in his hideout.
But one day, his assistant leads the pursuers right to his door.
I was in my room reading a book.
The location of the house was strategic.
And from his office window, Gilberto saw the army vehicles loaded with the Search Bloc approaching.
The whole street was full of officials and people in uniforms.
He entered the room and said, "Honey, we've been caught.
" He went to hide and told me to open the door.
They threw me on the floor.
Several men were pointing their guns at me.
And the house was completely swarmed with people.
All you could hear was them destroying, breaking and hitting everything.
It looks as if Gilberto has escaped.
Until He came out with his gun hanging from his thumb.
Saying, "Don't shoot me.
I am a man of peace.
" The Search Bloc discovers Gilberto in his secret compartment.
I didn't even know about it until that moment.
Authorities capture Gilberto Rodríguez, the world's most powerful drug trafficker without firing a single shot.
But Gilberto is only half of the Rodríguez duo.
His brother, Miguel, is still on the run.
It was a very strong hit for him knowing that his brother had been captured.
They never expected it.
They thought they had the perfect hiding spot for him.
And he was shocked.
And catching him will prove much harder.
Miguel went further underground.
They were more compartmentalized in their communications.
Less and less people knew his whereabouts, where he was and what he was doing.
We figure at this point, we really need to get an actionable source of information that is with Miguel real-time.
And then the DEA catches a break.
They get a call from a source who claims to be one of the cartel's inner circle.
If he wants to work with the US government and DEA in order to capture Miguel Rodríguez, he could potentially be a gold mine.
The only way to check him out is a secret meeting.
We would've never received permission or authority from the embassy, or DEA for that matter, too, to go and speak with him, so we didn't tell anybody where we were going.
But the agents know the unauthorized meeting could be a trap.
The tension was fairly high.
"Is this a setup? Is the cartel going to try to kidnap or kill us?" We had weapons on us and I had every magazine ammunition in case there was shooting.
And I remember at one point, I looked over at Dave and "What are we doing here? What's going on?" And then we saw him coming and he parked a little bit ahead of us and he got out the car.
After seven years of trusted service to the Rodríguez brothers, Jorge Salcedo wants out.
I was totally convinced that it was my last resource to get in contact with the American government.
Not the Colombian police, not the Colombian army, nobody.
And I start walking slowly.
At a certain point, I just hold my ID.
I said, "I handle Miguel's security.
This is my position.
My life is in your hands.
" In exchange for protection for himself and his family, Salcedo will betray the biggest drug lord in the world.
But Miguel is becoming increasingly paranoid.
Changing safe houses unexpectedly.
Finally, in July 1995, the man on the inside thinks he has pinpointed the location and the hunt begins.
We start searching.
We're going through the apartment, pulling bookcases and, you know, tapping on walls.
It looks like Salcedo has failed the agents.
Mitchell and Feistl call their informant.
"Hey, we're inside.
He's not here.
We can't find him.
" An hour later, Salcedo rings with more details.
"He's there.
He's in the apartment.
Is there a bathroom in the apartment? He's in a caleta.
" So Chris and I, we kinda look at the restroom and we saw a yellow hose going down and we're tugging on it.
Then we realize, "Hey, this is the hidden compartment.
" But Miguel's literally on the other side of the wall.
I mean, we know he's there.
Now it's just a matter of time, however long it can take us to get through that wall and to be able to extract Miguel from there.
Mitchell and Feistl are inches away from the biggest coup of their careers.
And then, the unthinkable happens.
There's a captain, and he goes, "Who's your source?" He's screaming, "Who's your source? Who's your source? How do you know there's a hidden compartment?" "Stop what you're doing.
This operation's being shut down.
" We all look at each other like, "Is this, like, a joke? What do you mean stop? Miguel Rodríguez is here.
He's behind this wall.
There's a hidden compartment here.
Look, how the" We're showing the drill bit going through.
"Look, there's space back there.
He's back there.
" The captain's insistence can only mean one thing.
He's corrupt.
Once we had to leave, you gotta realize that Chris and I were responsible for this source.
I mean, this source could possibly get killed now.
And not only the source, but his family members.
Agent Feistl delivers the bad news.
Chris was saying, "I'm very sorry, we had to leave.
" "What? You're no longer there?" "No.
" I knew that even the slightest suspicion that I had provided information, that will mean I'm dead.
Ever suspicious, Miguel now keeps his whereabouts under even tighter secrecy.
But he makes one fatal mistake.
He calls me and tells me, "Listen.
" He was very direct.
"I've been told that you, the day of the raid, you acted very nervously.
" I said, "Of course.
It was my responsibility to take care of you and it was blown.
I don't know how they did it.
" He said, "Yeah, sounds reasonable.
" Now security is even tighter.
But within three weeks, Salcedo finds Miguel's new hideout.
The DEA know this is their last chance.
Nobody knew what we were doing except a small group, a compartmentalized group of people that were with us.
Navy operators and some Colombian national police operators that were with us.
The bulk of the team had no idea what we were doing.
We didn't wanna have any sound, so we ran up ten flights of stairs.
We didn't take the elevator, because I was afraid that when you push the elevator button and the elevator got to the tenth floor, it would make that "ding.
" We got to the top, and there's the door.
There's a lot of noise, confusion, and then I hear, "Ya lo cogí.
Ya lo cogí.
" "You got 'em.
" "Who got who?" The Colombian commando grabbed him, took him out of the caleta, and we captured him.
He was in shock.
I don't think he was expecting that.
Miguel's life on the run is over.
I saw Miguel there and said, "Se acabó, señor".
"It's over.
" I think he realized at that point that his reign as the head of the Cali cartel had come to an end and he was gonna go to prison for a very, very long time.
The cartel, one of the world's biggest and most sophisticated drug operations, is finally cracked, from the inside.
And then, about 6:00 in the morning, I got a call "We got him.
Thanks to you, we got him.
" I said, "Thank you, God.
" It was wonderful, like it happened yesterday.
It was a great time.
I felt that the country had really turned a page on big cartels that had pretensions of taking power.
We all worked together to reach the same goal.
I'm proud of it, yeah.
" When I get there, the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, they were there, and their bodyguards.
There was a guy, and he had visible signs of being hurt.
Gilberto, very softly he said, "You know you're in trouble.
" And this guy, he said, "I admit I made a big mistake.
" At that point there was silence.
He knew what was gonna happen.
They tied him with chains to two cars and, slowly, they pulled him apart in opposite directions.
They were called the Gentlemen of Cali.
But I had never seen any organization so cruel, so bloody.
So bad.
December 1993, Cali.
Home to the new kings of coke.
Gilberto and Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela.
They've just become the most powerful cartel in Colombia.
Supplying 90% of the country's biggest export, cocaine.
Their tentacles reached out through all continents.
The Rodríguez brothers were essentially defined as the biggest criminals in the world.
The largest cartel of all time.
The brothers are pulling in an estimated seven billion dollars a year.
The country was not in the hands of the people, it was in the hands of the mob.
The Rodríguez brothers owned Colombia.
But the Colombian police and the American DEA are joined in a bitter campaign to bring them down.
You knew about the power, the influence and the money that they had, so you'd sit back and think, "How are you gonna catch these guys?" Rural southern Colombia, the 1940s.
Gilberto and younger brother Miguel grow up in small-town poverty.
As teenagers, they make a name for themselves as hustlers with their creative money-making schemes.
Gilberto worked in a drugstore located just in front of one of the main churches in Cali.
All year, they collected small bottles.
And during the Holy Week, they filled them with water and sold them by saying it was holy water.
It's not long before the pair graduate from petty crime to the hard-core robbing trucks, racketeering, even kidnapping.
When they buy a legitimate pharmacy, it mysteriously burns down.
It was my uncle and my dad.
They took out the most expensive products.
The drugstore burnt down completely.
They did a good job.
They claimed insurance.
They collected the insurance and opened another drugstore a much larger drugstore.
In the mid-'70s, Gilberto and his brother discover another Colombian pharmaceutical that offers even larger profits.
There's a booming market for cocaine in the US.
If they can get it there.
Ever inventive, the pair buy a company exporting concrete fence posts into Miami.
Each of them filled with some hidden cargo.
My father's chauffeur asked me to go to the hangar with him because he had some work to do.
When we went down to the hangar, he used a pneumatic hammer to break the posts and get the cocaine out.
That's how I discovered that my father was a drug trafficker.
By now, the brothers are moving millions of dollars of coke.
Eager to expand, they team up with two other ambitious traffickers to build their distribution in America.
Chepe Santacruz and Pacho Herrera.
The Cali cartel is here.
Chepe used to send 20 kilograms in suitcases carried by passengers.
My father said, "No.
" He believed 20 kilograms was too little.
He suggested they started sending in 100 or 200 kilograms.
By the mid-1980s, the Rodríguez brothers are shipping industrial quantities of coke to the US.
They could get a 727 for a million dollars on the used airplane market, fill it full of tons and tons of cocaine, fly it over the border and land it in some place in New Mexico and unload it and abandon the plane.
Just leave it there.
The million dollars that it cost to bring the plane in was nothing compared to the hundreds of millions they were making on shipments like that.
But the new source of drugs has started to appear on the feds' radar.
We knew about the Cali cartel because we had major loads when I was in Miami.
And anytime you had ton loads seized in Miami, you know it had the markings of the Cali cartel.
We always heard about the Cali cartel, we'd heard about the Rodríguez brothers, but it's kinda like the bogeyman when you were a kid.
You always knew that they were there in the closet, but you couldn't see 'em or know where they were.
But you knew they were always around.
Ever secretive, the brothers build a screen of legitimate companies to hide their thriving narcotics empire.
To the outside world they're just big businessmen.
They owned a bank.
They owned the best soccer team.
They owned, at that time, 250 drugstores.
We estimate that every day they could invest $25 million in all their businesses.
I saw rooms stuffed full of money.
At home, our safe was full of dollars.
They didn't know what to do with the money; it was too much.
They bought works by Picasso, Grau, Botero.
The feds try tracking the cartel's operations, but they can't follow the trail of corrupt money back to the brothers.
Gilberto was something of a genius.
He was called the Chess Player 'cause he's always looking ahead, looking how things would work together.
In reality, he was a great strategist and a great corrupter.
Whereas Miguel Rodríguez was a strong man, determined and ill-tempered.
And that match was the perfect combination.
Cocaine is their business, but power is their drug.
Now, at the top of their game, these are the Gentlemen of Cali, with friends in high places.
They liked mixing in the circles of power and corrupt those within.
They particularly liked mixing with politicians, senators, representatives, mayors.
And that was the focus of the Rodríguez corruption.
As demand increases, millions of dollars of Colombian coke is flooding into the US every week.
But it's another cartel that's monopolizing the DEA's efforts.
Run by the Rodríguez brothers' biggest rival.
A drug lord with a taste for publicity and a very public bloodlust.
Pablo Escobar.
Now a narco state, Colombia is divided between these two immensely powerful drug cartels.
Escobar's Medellín cartel in the north and the Cali cartel in the south.
The cartels controlled, you know, everything from the police, the military, through the politicians.
For years, the cartels walk a very delicate line, respecting each other's turf.
At the beginning, they were all close friends and each had their own patch.
They had a rule New York belonged to the Cali cartel.
Los Angeles belonged to the Medellín cartel.
Miami and Houston were shared cities where both could enter.
And this was always respected.
Each has their own distinct way of running their business.
Violence is Escobar's.
Pablo was basically a narco terrorist.
He killed people, he intimidated people and he threatened people.
It was a very tense time in Colombia.
In fact, the apartment I ended up living in took some of the shock waves from one of the bombs he exploded in Bogotá.
Pablo was disrupting everything in the country, and he was enemy number one.
The Cali cartel has a subtler way of exerting its power.
Gilberto said, "Look, we think differently.
Pablo thinks that by planting bombs, threatening, kidnapping He will gain power, but that is not our way.
" Their MO was to bribe people, to discredit people, to get them on board.
So they did everything in a much lower profile.
They knew if they went around killing police officers, setting bombs in streets, that's bad for business.
With the spotlight on Escobar, the brothers expand their business under the DEA's radar.
But then, a shock wave hits Colombia.
Under the threat of extradition, Pablo Escobar declares war on the entire Colombian state.
And, his old friends, the Cali cartel.
The first thing Pablo did, in a raid, was burn down 18 or 20 of their drugstores in Medellín.
Four or five shopkeepers died.
It's all-out war between the cartels.
Then, Escobar makes it very personal.
They had a phone conversation with Pablo Escobar in which he told them, "If you are not with me you're against me I'll show them that I can have you killed in five minutes.
" A bomb was planted in Jardín City to try to kill my uncle.
And they tried to kidnap me when I was at university.
The Rodríguez family is under siege.
One time, my father showed us a video tape he had received in an envelope.
He sat all his children and nephews down and made us watch it.
He had filmed us and narrated everything with his own voice.
He said, "Look, that's your oldest son, his name is Fernando.
He drives a red Mazda L, with plate so and so.
He has four escorts and two motorbikes.
Look, this is your other son.
" When I saw that video, I shuddered.
I went cold because he had us fully identified.
I had thought we were invisible.
When the threats against our family started and they said our children had to leave the country that was the worst moment of our lives.
The saddest, the most horrible.
Gilberto and Miguel are furious.
No more the Gentlemen of Cali, it's time to fight back.
First, they must find someone with the right kind of connections.
They turn to the son of a Colombian general who's provided mercenaries for the Colombian army in the past.
His name, Jorge Salcedo.
Cali cartel needed people of the ability and the strength to cope with Pablo Escobar.
'Cause they were merciless people capable of doing the most horrible, unimaginable things.
To his surprise, the Rodríguez brothers put Salcedo in charge of a handpicked squad.
I was never asked, "Will you do it?" It was a situation where I had no way out.
But my thought is, "Once this thing is over, I will just leave.
That's my mission, period.
" February 1989.
Salcedo flies in his band of hardened soldiers from special forces all over the world.
The maverick mercenaries film every step of their secret mission.
It's very much like the movies, like The Dirty Dozen, there were 12 in this team.
There was one specialized in explosives, there was a medic, there was another guy in intelligence.
I knew they were not nuns, but you cannot confront nuns with Pablo Escobar.
Their leader, David Tomkins, is a soldier of fortune, a veteran of the battlefields of Angola.
The target was to eliminate, neutralize kill, assassinate Pablo Escobar.
Tomkins meets the cartel and names his price for Escobar's head.
And kind of ceremoniously, he said, "This will be costing you one million dollars.
" Instantly, Gilberto said, "Twice that amount, three times, that's not a problem if you are capable of giving us back the family life that we used to have.
" They named their secret mission to assassinate their arch enemy "Operation Phoenix.
" First step, they find a training base in the jungle.
Then the brothers equip them with an arsenal of weapons.
No expense spared.
We had M16s, AR-15s, Zulu grenades, hand grenades, machine pistols, the whole nine yards.
It was like a toy shop.
Next, they must decide where to carry out the hit on Escobar.
Unfortunately, he was a very elusive target.
The government were after him, the Cali cartel were after him, so he had lots of enemies.
So we decided, "Right, we'll train specifically for Hacienda Nápoles.
" Escobar's heavily defended 7,000 acre ranch is the last place he will expect an attack.
And the mercenaries have a plan.
Historically, whilst the police had been there before, they had never been attacked, so we figured that we had a tactical advantage by approaching as police and military.
I'm about to change the color of this United States of America chopper.
And we're gonna respray it a nice Colombian police green.
But once the soldiers land, they know Escobar's bodyguards won't go down without a fight.
So we had a dress rehearsal, rehearsed the battle without an enemy.
While we were training, the Cali cartel were attempting to locate Escobar.
So we waited and we waited and we waited.
Three months after they land in Colombia, the brothers' web of informers locates Pablo Escobar.
Eventually, we got a call, "He's there, sitting round the swimming pool at a meeting.
" It's very unlikely that we're gonna have a better opportunity than now.
We got the signal, "Go.
" And we flew to Hacienda Nápoles.
The hired guns set off, while the Rodríguez brothers monitor the mission from Cali.
They were just listening like people will listen to a radio at a soccer game.
And constantly "Where are you? Where are you? How's it going?" "Yeah, we're approaching the location.
" The Cali cartel has been waiting years for this moment.
With Pablo Escobar dead, they will finally be the dominant drug lords of Colombia.
After about two hours, we hit very bad weather.
The helicopters didn't like it, 'cause they were very heavily loaded with ammunition and explosives and we were trying to get over a mountain range.
Our pilot thought he could get through this gap in the mountains.
We hit a bunch of cloud.
The pilot said, "I'm diving into it.
" And that was the last thing I heard from him.
The mercenaries' helicopter crashes into the side of a mountain, killing the Colombian pilot and badly injuring some of the team.
It was terrible.
It was absolutely atrocious.
Operation Phoenix, Gilberto and Miguel's elaborate plot to kill Escobar fails.
The blow is devastating.
But refusing to admit defeat, the cartel comes up with a new plan of action.
Joining forces with an unlikely ally which wants Escobar dead as much as they do.
The Colombian state.
The Rodríguezes were funneling all the funds and information and materials to be helpful in intelligence.
The Cali cartel I mean, their intelligence network was incredible.
It's been compared to the KGB during the Cold War.
The brothers even managed to tap Escobar's own phone lines.
Gilberto's partner, Aura, is one of the few trusted to hear the highly sensitive recordings.
When I found something important, I recorded the relevant bits to another tape.
And those compilation tapes with anything interesting were sent to Miguel.
He then sent them to the state intelligence agencies.
Letting them know about possible attacks.
From their network of informants, the brothers' intel reaches the Search Bloc, Colombia's special ops unit dedicated to tracking down Escobar.
On December 2nd, 1993, the hunters close in on their prey shooting Escobar dead in a hail of gunfire on a Medellín rooftop.
The Rodríguez brothers have helped eliminate Colombia's most brazen enemy, and their most ferocious rival.
Gilberto was totally euphoric.
He couldn't believe they had succeeded.
He cried, saying, "I saved my children's lives.
" The whole town was in carnival, sponsored by them.
There was an open bar for everybody who wanted to celebrate.
Gilberto and Miguel now believe they're invulnerable.
And Salcedo's job is done.
Or so he thinks.
Naively, I thought, "The Rodríguezes will let me go.
" So I'm thinking that this is my time to say goodbye.
But Miguel immediately answers, "No, no, no.
No, Jorge, you've gotta stay here.
We still have some things to do.
" I thought to myself, "Oh, my god.
This is not real.
" Instead of standing him down, Miguel promotes Salcedo to head of his personal security team.
It's a decision that will come back to haunt the brothers.
With the collapse of Escobar's empire, the Cali cartel is triumphant.
It now controls 90% of Colombia's cocaine traffic, worth billions and billions of dollars.
In the mid-'90s, the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers were essentially defined as the biggest criminals in the world.
And control of Colombia itself is now in the brothers' hands.
It's their drug money which flows through the country's veins.
They paid a wage to everyone in Cali.
They had the government, they had the mayor, ministers, they had congressmen, people in the president's house, army forces, the police forces.
For many years the corrupting power of money kept them safe.
My father, Gilberto, and my uncle Miguel always believed that money could buy anyone.
But just when the brothers think they finally have everything under control, they find themselves on the wrong side of the law again.
The day that Pablo Escobar died, the director of the DEA in Colombia says, "And when are we going to capture the Rodríguez Orejuelas?" They were the only game in town.
Pablo was done, Medellín cartel was done.
Everybody knew the next logical move for all of the US government and the Colombian resources was to target the Cali cartel.
Special agents Chris Feistl and David Mitchell are sent to Cali on a secret mission.
Bring down the brothers.
But not everyone is willing to play ball.
There were other people, too, that thought, "Hey, we kind of owe them a debt because they helped the Colombian government go after Pablo and Medellín cartel.
" So there was a slight reluctance to target them.
So the feds play their trump card.
The United States provides huge amounts of financial support and aid.
You want this aid and you want our military help, you need to crack down on the drug trafficking.
Feistl and Mitchell team up with DEA Agent Jerry Salameh, but they soon realize that the brothers still control the streets.
Anything that happened in Cali, they would know about it.
They spread money around to so many different people, they were able to really know what was going on at any given time.
And we were staying at the police base where the Search Bloc was located.
We were extremely low profile.
Anything we had to do outside of the base, we'd do at night.
We, through a source, received some cassette tapes of us speaking on the phone, the hard line phones in that base.
You know, back to Bogotáor whoever we were talking to, the source brought us tapes.
And said, "They got your phones.
They got your phones that you're using.
" So you really didn't know who you can trust and who you couldn't.
We knew the police in Cali were infiltrated by the cartel.
We sacked around 10,000 police officers.
That really hurt.
But it had to be done.
It's time for the authorities to go on the offensive.
After years living in high society, Gilberto and Miguel are forced into hiding.
Colombian forces raid one safe house after another.
All fitted with secret compartments, or caletas.
But the brothers are always one step ahead of the law.
So, for example, if we had good information that Miguel may have been at a location and we get there and it's empty is there a possibility that that raid got compromised? If so, who had access to that information? So it was kind of play as you go, figure it out on the fly.
Like all gangsters, the brothers fear one thing above all others.
Betrayal.
And they make the brutal consequences of it known to everyone around them.
Including Salcedo.
One night, Miguel tells Salcedo to meet him at a villa on the edge of Cali.
I can hear shouting, screaming I couldn't understand what was happening.
There's no Miguel, just henchmen and a group of Panamanians who they suspect of informing.
In one of the rooms there was a violent fight.
Three or four guys trying to take hold of one Panamanian guy.
And I remember there was a guy with a big knife.
Then I got an idea what's going on.
They're killing people now.
Not even the women are spared.
Her feet were extending like a ballet dancer.
She had been suffocated.
One of the guys was saying, "Hey, you better move out of there, because she's gonna urinate.
" How did he know? He's experienced.
They were masters in the killing.
They were using the knives to open their stomachs to make sure that when thrown in the river the bodies would not surface.
Awful.
Awful.
Salcedo soon realizes Miguel wants him to witness a massacre.
There was no reason for me to be there.
That was something that had been carefully planned.
They needed me somehow to get dirty with what they're doing.
Now I am in the fraternity of the killing.
The brothers have shown their true face.
The only way out of the cartel is death.
But what Miguel and Gilberto don't know is how near the edge they are.
The DEA are closing in.
We had a tremendous surveillance operation mounted in that area.
We had, you know, men, women, DEA, police.
The behavior of one man in particular draws their attention.
They suspect he's Gilberto's assistant.
Every day, he would travel where we suspected Gilberto was hiding.
Probably four to five miles to get from one house to the other.
He was very hard to follow.
He would walk, he would take buses, he would take cabs.
Changing clothes.
He would dip into a building and then slip back out of it.
Gilberto thinks he's safe in his hideout.
But one day, his assistant leads the pursuers right to his door.
I was in my room reading a book.
The location of the house was strategic.
And from his office window, Gilberto saw the army vehicles loaded with the Search Bloc approaching.
The whole street was full of officials and people in uniforms.
He entered the room and said, "Honey, we've been caught.
" He went to hide and told me to open the door.
They threw me on the floor.
Several men were pointing their guns at me.
And the house was completely swarmed with people.
All you could hear was them destroying, breaking and hitting everything.
It looks as if Gilberto has escaped.
Until He came out with his gun hanging from his thumb.
Saying, "Don't shoot me.
I am a man of peace.
" The Search Bloc discovers Gilberto in his secret compartment.
I didn't even know about it until that moment.
Authorities capture Gilberto Rodríguez, the world's most powerful drug trafficker without firing a single shot.
But Gilberto is only half of the Rodríguez duo.
His brother, Miguel, is still on the run.
It was a very strong hit for him knowing that his brother had been captured.
They never expected it.
They thought they had the perfect hiding spot for him.
And he was shocked.
And catching him will prove much harder.
Miguel went further underground.
They were more compartmentalized in their communications.
Less and less people knew his whereabouts, where he was and what he was doing.
We figure at this point, we really need to get an actionable source of information that is with Miguel real-time.
And then the DEA catches a break.
They get a call from a source who claims to be one of the cartel's inner circle.
If he wants to work with the US government and DEA in order to capture Miguel Rodríguez, he could potentially be a gold mine.
The only way to check him out is a secret meeting.
We would've never received permission or authority from the embassy, or DEA for that matter, too, to go and speak with him, so we didn't tell anybody where we were going.
But the agents know the unauthorized meeting could be a trap.
The tension was fairly high.
"Is this a setup? Is the cartel going to try to kidnap or kill us?" We had weapons on us and I had every magazine ammunition in case there was shooting.
And I remember at one point, I looked over at Dave and "What are we doing here? What's going on?" And then we saw him coming and he parked a little bit ahead of us and he got out the car.
After seven years of trusted service to the Rodríguez brothers, Jorge Salcedo wants out.
I was totally convinced that it was my last resource to get in contact with the American government.
Not the Colombian police, not the Colombian army, nobody.
And I start walking slowly.
At a certain point, I just hold my ID.
I said, "I handle Miguel's security.
This is my position.
My life is in your hands.
" In exchange for protection for himself and his family, Salcedo will betray the biggest drug lord in the world.
But Miguel is becoming increasingly paranoid.
Changing safe houses unexpectedly.
Finally, in July 1995, the man on the inside thinks he has pinpointed the location and the hunt begins.
We start searching.
We're going through the apartment, pulling bookcases and, you know, tapping on walls.
It looks like Salcedo has failed the agents.
Mitchell and Feistl call their informant.
"Hey, we're inside.
He's not here.
We can't find him.
" An hour later, Salcedo rings with more details.
"He's there.
He's in the apartment.
Is there a bathroom in the apartment? He's in a caleta.
" So Chris and I, we kinda look at the restroom and we saw a yellow hose going down and we're tugging on it.
Then we realize, "Hey, this is the hidden compartment.
" But Miguel's literally on the other side of the wall.
I mean, we know he's there.
Now it's just a matter of time, however long it can take us to get through that wall and to be able to extract Miguel from there.
Mitchell and Feistl are inches away from the biggest coup of their careers.
And then, the unthinkable happens.
There's a captain, and he goes, "Who's your source?" He's screaming, "Who's your source? Who's your source? How do you know there's a hidden compartment?" "Stop what you're doing.
This operation's being shut down.
" We all look at each other like, "Is this, like, a joke? What do you mean stop? Miguel Rodríguez is here.
He's behind this wall.
There's a hidden compartment here.
Look, how the" We're showing the drill bit going through.
"Look, there's space back there.
He's back there.
" The captain's insistence can only mean one thing.
He's corrupt.
Once we had to leave, you gotta realize that Chris and I were responsible for this source.
I mean, this source could possibly get killed now.
And not only the source, but his family members.
Agent Feistl delivers the bad news.
Chris was saying, "I'm very sorry, we had to leave.
" "What? You're no longer there?" "No.
" I knew that even the slightest suspicion that I had provided information, that will mean I'm dead.
Ever suspicious, Miguel now keeps his whereabouts under even tighter secrecy.
But he makes one fatal mistake.
He calls me and tells me, "Listen.
" He was very direct.
"I've been told that you, the day of the raid, you acted very nervously.
" I said, "Of course.
It was my responsibility to take care of you and it was blown.
I don't know how they did it.
" He said, "Yeah, sounds reasonable.
" Now security is even tighter.
But within three weeks, Salcedo finds Miguel's new hideout.
The DEA know this is their last chance.
Nobody knew what we were doing except a small group, a compartmentalized group of people that were with us.
Navy operators and some Colombian national police operators that were with us.
The bulk of the team had no idea what we were doing.
We didn't wanna have any sound, so we ran up ten flights of stairs.
We didn't take the elevator, because I was afraid that when you push the elevator button and the elevator got to the tenth floor, it would make that "ding.
" We got to the top, and there's the door.
There's a lot of noise, confusion, and then I hear, "Ya lo cogí.
Ya lo cogí.
" "You got 'em.
" "Who got who?" The Colombian commando grabbed him, took him out of the caleta, and we captured him.
He was in shock.
I don't think he was expecting that.
Miguel's life on the run is over.
I saw Miguel there and said, "Se acabó, señor".
"It's over.
" I think he realized at that point that his reign as the head of the Cali cartel had come to an end and he was gonna go to prison for a very, very long time.
The cartel, one of the world's biggest and most sophisticated drug operations, is finally cracked, from the inside.
And then, about 6:00 in the morning, I got a call "We got him.
Thanks to you, we got him.
" I said, "Thank you, God.
" It was wonderful, like it happened yesterday.
It was a great time.
I felt that the country had really turned a page on big cartels that had pretensions of taking power.
We all worked together to reach the same goal.
I'm proud of it, yeah.